Google Image Search – Old vs. New

Searching images on Google was once quite time consuming. When you search for an image, all the results would appear on a page as thumbnails. You needed to hover over a particular thumbnail to get a larger view of it. To view the image in its actual size, you needed to click the image which would open the web page the image is from. The expanded image would appear superimposed over the web page view. If you wanted to check the search results once again, you had to click â€śBack.â€ť

This was quite a drag, and for users who still have not got to used to the new Google Image search, it still is, particularly if they are looking for some specific. There are quite a significant number of mouse clicks involved.

Google Images has been redesigned to provide a much better search experience. As always images come up in the search results. But the new Google Image Search does not open a web page when the user clicks on a particular image. Instead users can now easily skim through various image results displayed in an inline panel. If needed, users can click on the domain name or another website link provided in the preview to enter the web page which hosts the image. Or else, they can merely scroll down to continue with the rest of the search.

Publishers not wanting images from their website to appear in the results can of course do so with a robots.txt file. The new search is however more likely to help webmasters since there will be more genuine visitors to a site as Google claims it has seen in its tests.

Professional SEO services can optimize your websiteâ€™s images for Googleâ€™s image search with the right image ALT tag, image filename, surrounding text and overall webpage theme, which is how Google image search works. Only skilled web designers can optimize your images to ensure that they appear in Googleâ€™s search engine page results.